The Liberalism of Karl Popper

1976 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
John N. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Methodological Individualism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Critical Rationalism ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
On The Road

DESPITE ITS WIDE INFLUENCE, THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF KARL POPPER has received, until recently, remarkably little systematic attention from academic political theorists. Hailed by Isaiah Berlin as the most formidable of Marxism's living critics and reviled by Marxists as a prominent luminary of that White Emigration whose pernicious influence is mainly responsible for the ideological rejuvenation of a moribund reactionary culture, canonized as a prophet of freedom and enterprise and lumped together with such despised conservatives as Oakeshott, Namier and Butterfield as one of those who want only ‘to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little piecemeal engineering’, Popper incontestably has been a storm centre of several major ideological controversies. Equally, Popper's dissident reinterpretations of the thought of Plato and Hegel, like his defence of value-freedom and methodological individualism in the social sciences, have generated massive and subtly ramified literatures, while the form of critical rationalism which has been developed by some of his disciples has been seen, both by its proponents and by its enemies, as the foremost contribution to the contemporary struggle against irrationalism.

Politics and Morality in the Thought of Karl Popper

1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Minogue
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIND KARL POPPER BOTH FASCINATING and irritating. His vigour and lucidity are irresistible, and no one could complain that he fails to engage with the big questions. The problems begin when we consider his political thought. Some think him one of the great liberal philosophers of the century. I on the other hand, while being fascinated by The Open Society and its Enemies, am repelled by the grossness of its caricaturing of most of the thinkers it touches. The Poverty of Historicism is a marvellous text in the philosophy of the social sciences, but the idea of historicism is a straw man. The paradox seems to be that while there is a lot that refers to the political questions of the day, there is virtually nothing which takes up issues of political philosophy directly. The result is that he seems to me always to be on the wrong foot, and my problem is to discover why.

The Political Science Discipline in Argentina: The Political Scientist's National Association's Role

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 616-618
Author(s):  
Diego Mazzoccone ◽  
Mariano Mosquera ◽  
Silvana Espejo ◽  
Mariana Fancio ◽  
Gabriela Gonzalez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Science Discipline ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).

The Two Faces of Contingency

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Palonen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

The work of Pierre Rosanvallon is discussed here from the perspective of the conceptual history of “politics” (La Politique) and of “the political” (La Politique). In Rosanvallon's early work in the second half of the 1970s, there is a marked defence of the autonomy of politics, as a manifestation of contingency, against the language of “society,” then dominant in the social sciences and philosophy. Since the 1980s, Le Politique become a fashionable concept in French political thought, a phenomenon brought about by the reception of both Schmitt and Heidegger, in opposition to mere la politique. Although Rosanvallon can partly be linked to this fashion, he differs from his more philosophical colleagues in two respects: his concept of the political is more historically informed and he refrains from showing contempt for the activity of politics.

scholarly journals To OA or Not to OA?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aysa Ekanger ◽  
Erik Lieungh
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Open Access ◽  
Scholarly Communication ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
European Research ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The University

What are the main reasons for our scientists not to choose Open Access to their publications? Are the reasons just misconceptions, or are there some valid reasons as well? Adviser Aysa Ekanger at the University Library at UiT The Arctic University of Norway lays out the main reasons and some of the solutions to the concerns with Open Access. The host of this episode is Erik Lieungh. You can also read a more detailed overview of the possible obstacles on the road to Open Access in this whitepaper from @OPERASEU. OPERAS is a European research infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. This episode was first published 2 October 2018.

On the Road from Constance to 1688: The Political Thought of John Major and George Buchanan

1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Oakley
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Council ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
George Buchanan ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

It was Harold J. Laski who said “the road from Constance to 1688 is a direct one,” and he did so when speaking of the constitutional theories enunciated by the Conciliar thinkers and put into practice at the Council of Constance. These closely related theories had their roots deep in the corporative thinking of the medieval canon lawyers but sprang into prominence during the years after 1378, when the Western Church was divided first into two and then into three “obediences” under the sway of rival claimants to the Papacy. Basic to all the Conciliar theories was the central insistence that the final authority in the Church lay not with the Pope but with the whole body of the faithful and that the Pope possessed, therefore, not an absolute but merely a ministerial authority delegated to him for the good of the Church. This belief made it possible to appeal from the obduracy of the rival pontiffs to the decision of the faithful as expressed through their representatives assembled in a General Council of the whole Church, and such a possibility was actualized at the Councils of Pisa (1409) and Basel (1431-1449) and, most strikingly of all, at Constance (1414-1418). There it found expression, not only in the judgment and deposition of popes, but also in the promulgation of the decree Sacrosancta (1415), which declared:This sacred synod of Constance, forming a General Council … represents the Catholic Church and has immediate power from Christ which anyone, of whatsoever status and condition, even if holding the Papal dignity, is bound to obey in matters pertaining to the Faith, extirpation of the schism and reformation of the said Church in head and members.

“We Speak the Truth!”

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Sari Hanafi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Qualifications

This study investigates the preachers and their Friday sermons in Lebanon, raising the following questions: What are the profiles of preachers in Lebanon and their academic qualifications? What are the topics evoked in their sermons? In instances where they diagnosis and analyze the political and the social, what kind of arguments are used to persuade their audiences? What kind of contact do they have with the social sciences? It draws on forty-two semi-structured interviews with preachers and content analysis of 210 preachers’ Friday sermons, all conducted between 2012 and 2015 among Sunni and Shia mosques. Drawing from Max Weber’s typology, the analysis of Friday sermons shows that most of the preachers represent both the saint and the traditional, but rarely the scholar. While they are dealing extensively with political and social phenomena, rarely do they have knowledge of social science

The Politics of Global Health Inequalities

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-84
Author(s):  
Yusra Ribhi Shawar ◽  
Jennifer Prah Ruger
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Health Inequality ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Health ◽  
Political Determinants ◽  
The Social

Careful investigations of the political determinants of health that include the role of power in health inequalities—systematic differences in health achievements among different population groups—are increasing but remain inadequate. Historically, much of the research examining health inequalities has been influenced by biomedical perspectives and focused, as such, on ‘downstream’ factors. More recently, there has been greater recognition of more ‘distal’ and ‘upstream’ drivers of health inequalities, including the impacts of power as expressed by actors, as well as embedded in societal structures, institutions, and processes. The goal of this chapter is to examine how power has been conceptualised and analysed to date in relation to health inequalities. After reviewing the state of health inequality scholarship and the emerging interest in studying power in global health, the chapter presents varied conceptualisations of power and how they are used in the literature to understand health inequalities. The chapter highlights the particular disciplinary influences in studying power across the social sciences, including anthropology, political science, and sociology, as well as cross-cutting perspectives such as critical theory and health capability. It concludes by highlighting strengths and limitations of the existing research in this area and discussing power conceptualisations and frameworks that so far have been underused in health inequalities research. This includes potential areas for future inquiry and approaches that may expand the study of as well as action on addressing health inequality.

The Distribution of Emotions: Affective Politics of Emancipation

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well‐known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics.

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